MASM32 Limitations

[Xero Nilson]

Specifically I'm asking after include/symbol/equate/typedef limits. I'm interested to know how many include files, equates, typedefs and symbol names can be handled by the lastest version of MASM (8.2 I think, everyone who uses MASM should be using this version at least).

I know it's probably a bit ambitious for me, but I'm interested in converting the entire win32 PSDK includes into asm includes (1:1). I tried this project back in the early 90's but MASM & TASM both blew out the typedef(?) limit, this time I'll check that the programs can handle it before I start this project.

[hutch--]

Xero,

The later versions 6.14 and up have a very large capacity in this area and I have not found the limit with the sum total of include files in the masm32 project but beware, the task you undertake is no joy and all versions of ML.EXE are very fussy about sequential dependencies with equates and structures. Get it wrong and you get the "error count exceeds 100" problem.

Las I heard ML 8.?? was not stable and failed on code that the earlier versions work perfectly with. 7.10 is the latest I know to be reliable, 6.15 and 7.00 both work fine and support SSE2 so there is no real gain wit the later version at the moment. Note that 7.00 and 7.10 have broken *.asm support so you must use response files to build libraries.

[GregL]

Xero Nilson,

Don't confuse MASM32 version with MASM version. They are two different things.

[Xero Nilson]

Greg,

Can you please elaborate? I'm not sure what you mean.

[QvasiModo]

MASM is the assembler from Microsoft. MASM32 is a distribution package that contains the MASM assembler, amongst other things (like the masm32.lib library, and the include files for Windows programming). The MASM assembler alone can also be obtained from Microsoft directly, but without all the other goodies.